GOING WITH THE GRAIN
— by Holland Gidney
GET F
The final article in EAT’s three-part series on B.C.’s grain-aissance.
BACKYARD BREAD
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hen it comes to grain, it’s possible to shrink your 100-Mile Diet to 100 metres if you’re willing to get your hands dirty: a few seeds and a bit of land is all it takes to grow a loaf of bread. And wheat’s much less fussy than tomatoes. “If you can grow grass, you can grow grain,” proclaims the Island Grains project website. In fact, as participants in what turned out to be Vancouver Island’s largest grain-growing trial this year (myself included) discovered, grain might just be easier to grow than grass—especially when you don’t have to supply the land or prepare it for planting. Inspired in part by a second-hand copy of homesteading guru Gene Logsdon’s 1977 book Small-Scale Grain Raising, Brock McLeod and Heather Walker decided to invite 100 would-be farmers to plant 51 plots of grain at their Vancouver Island farm last April. The two Duncan farmers harvested small amounts of grain in 2008 and had already planted rye as a cover crop in the fall of 2009 when they were listening to Jon Steinman’s Deconstructing Dinner radio show last fall and heard how excited participants in the Kootenay Grain CSA were to visit the three Creston Valley farms where their grain was being grown. It convinced them to start what might be best described as a grain-growing club at their Makaria Farm on Bench Road near Cowichan Station, with the goal of getting people back in touch with where grains come from and demonstrate how easy they are to grow. Over the course of the spring and summer, we “grainies” learned about seed selection, planting timing and techniques, pests, weeding, harvesting, threshing, and even cooking with whole grains. The knowledge we collected from the experience was as valuable as the grain we all harvested at the end of August, and it proved that Dan Jason of Salt Spring Seeds was right: grains are easier than just about anything else you could grow. “Some people are intimidated because they think it can only be done by industrial agriculture,” he says. But even the hands-off, no-weeding, no-watering approach that many grainies adopted still yielded good grain. And it works equally well in backyards, as Claudia and Darren Copley found when they planted grain for the second year in a row in their Saanich garden. “Growing it is a cinch,” says Claudia who describes their process of planting oats, barley and three kinds of wheat as “prepare ground, sow, walk away.” Their intention was to produce steel-cut oats for breakfast, whole-grain barley for stews, and wheat flour for bread. However, freeing the oats from their hulls was a “nightmare.” It may be easy to grow grain, but where small-scale producers like the Copleys often run into trouble is after they harvest it because small-scale equipment is lacking in North America. For Islands Grains’ harvest day on August 24, Walker and McLeod had a collection of sickles, scythes and scissors on hand, and Dan Jason, who’s been growing grain since 1986, brought along his homemade threshing box for people to try. There was even the option of having the grain milled into flour by Bruce Stewart of True Grain Bread. Having to use makeshift harvest tools and not having access to a combine are two of the most common challenges to grain growers Chris Hergesheimer identified during his master’s thesis research. Or as he put it: “Equipment and machinery sharing, and the lack of adequate ‘post-harvest infrastructure’ (cleaning, storage, milling facilities).” Except in the Peace River District, which has several seed-cleaning co-operatives, and the North Okanagan, which has at least one milling co-operative, there is a serious lack of postharvest infrastructure for anyone wanting to process more than a small amount of grain for personal consumption. But what small-scale grain growers lack in equipment and infrastructure, they make up for in ingenuity. When asked to supply a local chef with two pounds of rye for an event, Walker and McLeod “harvested with scissors and threshed with a shoe.” On Salt Spring Island, Linda Quiring says the half-dozen folks who grew grain there this year all got together one afternoon to get their wheat threshed communally by “the only combine on the Island.” Dirk Keller of Qualicum Beach’s Sloping Hill Farm loaded his half-acre wheat harvest into two livestock trailers for threshing by combine-owner Wayne Smith in Port Alberni. Since Walker is optimistic that a good number of Island Grains participants will grow grain again, she suggests an equipment co-op may be the “logical next step.” Hergesheimer agrees, but he doesn’t believe small-scale grain production will ever become the norm. “But it will become a more prominent method in this refashioning of our relationship to grain, flour and bread,” he says. “We have been all about scaling up production, scaling up our machinery, scaling up our ‘commodities.’ In a sense, the backyard plots or the small CSA farms help us scale down again.” If we all scale down and start paying attention to the origin of the grains we consume, and maybe even taking responsibility for growing them ourselves, small-scale grain production may just become the next trend in local eating—and you can’t beat the taste of that. “Local grains taste different,” says Hergesheimer. “They taste like success, they taste like optimism. They taste like revolution.”
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EAT MAGAZINE MARCH | APRIL 2010
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